Ask HN: What Novel Are you Writing This Month?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1859332

by kiba • 16 years ago

39 39 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It's the start of the National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000 words novel in the span of one month.

What are you writing?

I am writing the "Courier War" which is about a tax-evading robotic courier network. My goal was to write 1666.67 words a day so that I will achieve the goal in 30 days.

runevault6• 16 years ago

Shooting for 100k words on a fantasy novel with a working title of The Hand of Power. Already sitting on 3270 words after a full day at work too, so making good time towards the 100k mark.

kiba2• 16 years ago

What is the Hand Of Power about?

runevault6• 16 years ago

My easiest answer is to copy my synopsis:

When a King dies, his son must discover if he needs to follow in his father's footsteps, of tread his own path of rulership. All the while holding onto a family secret dating back generations, one which helps them keep power... so long as no one knows about it.

Meanwhile his most trusted adviser finds herself crippled during an attack on the new King, destroying her both physically and mystically. She must discover who she truly is and how she can help her Liege in her new situation, while coming to understand just how dangerous the world really is.

edit: My "big theme" is exploring identity, in the young monarch's case figuring out who he is as a ruler, in the Elementalist's case figuring out how to handle life after her magic is crippled. All while dealing with strife from those who would depose him.

mattdw2• 16 years ago

A scifi-ish novel set in the slums of Jakarta and ranging over the rest of a near-future Oceania. 3200 words in, pretty much on target for the 50k month, but that probably won't be the end of the novel.

kiba2• 16 years ago

Mine is science fiction too as it is about predominately robots that carry stuff from one location to another evading polices. Pretty fun stuff.

But I don't know what your story's about?

mattdw2• 16 years ago

Mostly about a small girl trying to find her brother, who's been kidnapped from the slums and taken to NZ for some nefarious purpose I haven't discovered yet.

grandalf3• 16 years ago

Just wanted to mention a site I made called One Page Per Day. Lots of people are using it to do NaNo this year:

http://www.onepageperday.com

pjscott3• 16 years ago

How does that work? Wouldn't you need to write several pages per day to finish NaNoWriMo? If we estimate 250 words per page (typical in ordinary-sized books) then you'd need to write more than six pages per day to finish on time. Do you give people very large pages? Or does the name actually mean "At least one page per day"?

grandalf3• 16 years ago

it means at least one per day :)

samratjp2• 16 years ago

Thats cool. Sounds like 750words. But, OhLife seems to be something that one might actually follow through. http://ohlife.com/b

grandalf3• 16 years ago

Not sure I follow what you mean. Lots of people are using One Page Per Day every day and getting a LOT written.

Jach• 16 years ago

While I'm not expecting to finish, and it may be more of a novella than a novel, I started a story based on a weird dream I had a couple nights ago. It involves stupidity, romance, danger, escape, other good stuff, and is all taking place in a world fairly similar to Minecraft's.

johnfn• 16 years ago

I'm doing an experiment: I'm writing a novel without knowing what it's about at all beforehand. I find things out only as I write them down.

So far: It's fairly close to real life, with a touch of sci-fi (which I expect to become more than a touch pretty soon). The setting is - currently - a big building in a city, and I'm trying to work hard on character development (since I always have trouble with that).

I'm finding the biggest problem with this strategy is that I need a motivator to keep my characters going. But it seems to be working for now. We'll see in a couple of days :)

runevault6• 16 years ago

Good luck with that. I made an attempt at a novel (not during NaNo) where I had an intro situation/scene in my head and an idea at the ending, but that was it.

Around 30k words I was in a hole I had no idea how to get out of, so I sidelined the story until I have the time/energy to go back and fix it, building a proper plot structure with an attempt at keeping as much of what I'd already written as possible. But it's low priority compared to NaNo and a series I've had in the back of my head for something like a year.

jonnathanson4• 16 years ago

Agreed. Writing something as long-form as a novel without planning it out ahead of time is going to lead to frustration and, ultimately, a weaker final product.

Would you build a house without a blueprint?

pjscott3• 16 years ago

An as-yet-untitled fantasy adventure, where I'm including every cool idea I can fit in there, just for the fun of it. There will be a world with Escher-style gravity, and another place with a fractal tree structure where long-distance journeys happen in logarithmic time, and the characters will have very best dialog I can muster. This time, I'm going to try to use foreshadowing, and avoid expo-dumping.

Good luck, everybody.

techtalsky2• 16 years ago

I'm actually doing a variant I like to call NaRaRaMo (national rap rapping month) where I write, rehearse, and record (and post on youtube) a rhyme every single day in November. One so far of course.

psawaya• 16 years ago

That sounds amazing. Link?

(unless you were joking, but I still think NaRaRaMo is a great idea)

bambax• 16 years ago

This is apparently it:

http://videos.apnicommunity.com/Video,Item,1068300085.html

techtalsky2• 16 years ago

I was not joking. This is the link to the playlist... which still only has one rap: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=43D4E838F379E338

The second rap is coming in mere minutes though.

tjmc• 16 years ago

What am I writing? This link to a friend's website: http://101reasonstostopwriting.com

Unfortunately he abandoned it after only 17 reasons. Perhaps he convinced himself?

shabda• 16 years ago

http://github.com/shabda/nanowrimo/tree/master/outline/

I am writing it with markdown and git.

pjscott3• 16 years ago

That's pretty cool. I'm using Git and a simple text-based markup of my own devising, which is automatically translated into LaTeX (with the excellent memoir document class) so I can do proofreading on a nice-looking PDF. I was getting a little jittery while waiting for November to start, so that software was fun to write.

shrughes• 16 years ago

I'm not really sure what I'm writing, but I'm writing something. There is no focus character development, some action, and so far it mostly consists of the author trolling the reader. So far the protagonist has walked through a desert, talked to a discoloration, survived a gunfight, won the admiration of street urchins, and started the perilous admissions process for some kind of school. It's basically ridiculous(ly bad), and there is no plan for the future plot or really even a well-laid-out setting. But hey, Nanowrimo is not about the plot.

petewailes• 16 years ago

I'm finishing (so it doesn't really count) Children of Vitruvius, a future-punk/sci-f novel on the conflict of humanity's desire to do things because it can, against doing things because we should.

I've about 60-70k words left to go, so going to do that instead.

harscoat• 16 years ago

It's called "The Xi", it's about the "Firefighters Foreign Legion". They are on a sacred mission ;) I served 5y. in the Paris Fire Brigade, hence the inspiration. Now since it is a hobby, I just need to write a little bit regularly to finish it one day (I should do 1500 caracters without space/day) it turns out that it is hard! That's one of the main reason w/ my cofounder we started Quantter. It allows you to track your progress not only on performance but more important on regularity, and your friends can cheer you on when your regularity drops. One line per day & your novel is on the way;) Looking forward to reading your stories guys!

drinian• 16 years ago

Someday, I'd like to try this. But right now, every day, I write the book.

failquicker• 16 years ago

I'm writing "Everwake"

It's about a future where our preoccupation with productivity led us to genetically engineer away our need/ability to sleep. In this future sleep becomes the drug of choice and the domain of the counter culture.

I have a framework I wrote last month and a good friend of mine is a sci-fi editor. She agreed to give me notes, mainly so I would leave her alone.

Not really going to set a word a day goal. With me, I find that sometimes only a few hundred words eek out. While other days 3000-4000 come out freely.

cstross2• 16 years ago

Hmm. Are you familiar with "Beggars in Spain" by Nancy Kress? (Hint: past decade Hugo-award winner.)

NB: if not, do not go and read it just now. Finish your own work first, then read it.

cstross2• 16 years ago

I'm not in nanowrimo because I was 56,000 words into this one before November 1st, but ...

I'm continuing to write "The Apocalypse Codex", the fourth Laundry Files novel. At the start of the series, Bob Howard, a slashdot-reading sandal-wearing geek, accidentally got himself conscripted by the Laundry, that branch of the British secret service concerned with applications of Computational Demonology -- defending the realm from Lovecraftian horrors.

Ten years on, Bob has been shunted onto the management promotion fast-track as the emergency generated by the return of the Elder Gods gathers pace. In this installment, he's been put in charge of a couple of external contractors (hint: the Laundry never uses contractors -- officially) and tasked with learning just why a certain televangelist is cosying up to the Prime Minister. "I feel like I've been given a sack of catnip and a laser pointer and told to go play with the kittens behind the fence labelled 'Siberian Tigers'" he complains -- except the tigers have run into a big game hunter, and the fecal matter is about to hit the wind farm ...

_b8r0• 16 years ago

I would love to write this month but:

I'm running an event on targeted attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats.

I have a research paper to finish on a class of vulnerabilities.

I'm preparing for my Tigerscheme SST exam.

I'm taking part in the HN November launch month.

I'm growing a comedy moustache for prostate cancer awareness this Movember (http://uk.movember.com/mospace/552354/ if you want to donate, all donations gratefully received!)

My November is unfortunately too packed to the gills. Of course, I could always write a novel about my november.... No, wait...

joeld42• 16 years ago

I used my app to generate a topic for my novel, here's my blog post about it:

http://www.tapnik.com/post/nano2010

The topic was "Mistaken Judgement / Corporate / Cannon", so far the novel is about a burnt out software dev at a large and increasingly irrelevant company in the pacific northwest who travels to mars in a cannon. It's in the modern day but with the astrophysics of the age of reason transplanted -- mars has atmosphere, canals and forests, etc..

I'm "jdavis" on NaNoWriMo, add me as a writing buddy!

Ask HN: What Novel Are you Writing This Month?

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